I’m Mr Bicen.
Teacher, YouTuber
& Mathematician.

It depends on what your situation is, but generally, my videos are designed to teach deeply and fully. Solid learning doesn’t come easily, and you need to spend lots of time with these challenging concepts. For topics that you feel you have a weak understanding of, I’d recommend watching the full playlist of videos and using my lesson booklets (which can be found in the resources section) alongside to get comprehensive teaching on that specific chapter.

You can find the playlists easily from my YouTube channel homepage – just scroll to the relevant section, and click to expand and see a playlist for each chapter, with each one matching the exercises from the official Pearson textbooks.

If you’re just looking to recap something, then I’d recommend my chapter summaries – these have their own dedicated playlist on the channel homepage, but can also be found at the end of each topic’s playlist!

Have a look at the other resources I have, there’s plenty there, and I’m sure you’ll find something useful!

You’re working hard, understanding topics… and then exams don’t go so well. This is a really common experience, and there are lots of reasons this can happen. Here are some of these reasons, with some suggestions about what to do about it:

‘I run out of time’ – make sure you’re always practising exam questions in timed conditions; this will help you get used to the time constraints. Secondly, practising something makes you get faster at it – if you’re taking a long time on a particular skill, do a lot of practice, and naturally your timing will improve!

‘I can’t understand what the question wants me to do’ – make sure you’ve deeply learned the topic, not just the methods – once you’ve done this (perhaps using my videos), practise, practise, practise. If you get stuck, use videos that walk through the question, ask your friends, ask your teacher… make sure you understand it! You’ll start to see how examiners are trying to test you, and after seeing enough questions, you’ll spot patterns of what is required.

‘I have left it too late, I need a quick fix!’ – unfortunately, learning is a challenging process, and you need to dedicate enough time if you want to feel truly confident with the subject. This might feel daunting at first, but I guarantee you’ll feel so much better in the long run – get started!

The videos were created with the most popular exam board for the UK in mind, Pearson Edexcel. However, the content, especially for Pure, is the same for all the major British exam boards, and many students use my videos who study for AQA, OCR, etc. My videos just tend to have a focus on the style that Edexcel ask questions!

The exercises in the titles of my videos refer to the exercises from the official Pearson Edexcel textbooks – the blue cover with the shell for Pure, the brown cover with running person for Applied, and the green cover with the butterfly for Core Pure (Further Maths). You can see the ones I mean here: Edexcel AS and A level Mathematics and Further Mathematics

Students often ask if they need to have a graphics calculator – and the answer is no! However, I do think it can make learning and exams slightly less stressful, offering some advantages in distributions for statistics, keeping track of calculations with a larger screen, and the ability to graph more tricky functions. The graphics calculator is a powerful tool for checking your answers, and reassuring you that what you have done is correct (or alerting you that you may have made a mistake!), but it does NOT do the maths for you. If you rely on it too much, marks are not awarded in the exam, so be careful.

The current graphics model I recommend is the Casio fx-CG100, but if you can get your hands on the previous model, the fx-CG50, this is equally powerful and useful.

If you want the standard calculator, the one I recommend is the Casio fx-991CW.

Some models of calculator won’t have enough abilities for your exams – this is why I recommend these two models in particular!

Tip: keep your graphics calculator in great condition so you can resell it to future students and recoup some of the expense!

Joining the channel as a Member is different to Subscribing – channel members pay a monthly subscription via YouTube to access member videos – i.e. all the videos covering the Further Maths Options modules.

Make sure that you are logged in with a personal account (work/school accounts typically remove the option to Join), and then click the Join button next to Subscribe on my channel home.

Select the Further Maths Options tier (or above) to access all the videos for your options modules. The price is £22.99 when joined via a browser, but significantly higher when joining via iOS/Android, for no extra perks – so make sure to Join from your computer/laptop!

This is my top membership tier, and as well as allowing students to access the Further Maths Options videos, it allows them to join a private Discord community.

Once per week, I have a drop-in session for one hour (the day each week varies in order to avoid clashing with any pre-existing commitments members may have), and am available ad hoc to answer messages.

The best part, however, is joining a community of likeminded students in similar situations to you – students help each other, answer each others’ questions, and generally make the server a great place to be! As before, the cheapest price is found by joining via YouTube on a web-based browser rather than on mobile with iOS or Android.

I am one of very few people who have content that covers every module Further Maths, and spent a huge amount of time learning, preparing to teach, recording and editing the videos for these modules – it was a massive commitment, and one that I couldn’t have made if I weren’t to make income from this. I am lucky enough to be able to work full-time on YouTube, but without income streams from some of my content, I would be unable to do this. I wish I was able to make it free for everyone, but this isn’t something that is viable for me as a creator at this stage.

Unfortunately, there is no function on YouTube for me to be able to offer any form of discount at all, otherwise this is something that I would certainly like to be able to offer.

However, if you do receive a bursary, and would like to come to any of my paid-for live sessions on Zoom (these take place in February half-term, in the Easter break, and in the run up to exams), then please email me evidence of your bursary status to bicen@bicenmaths.uk and I am very happy to create an individual discount code that offers a very large discount.

Many students have used only my resources to self-teach A-Level Maths and/or Further Maths – so it is definitely possible! I generally advise students to plan backwards from the date they want to be finished by. I recommend a finish date for around the end of March/early April of the year you are taking the exams, in order to give you enough time to work on exam papers and exam technique.

Once you have some checkpoints in place of how much content you need to have covered by when, the methods for learning should be pretty simple!

Using my lesson booklets (which can be found in the resources section) follow along with the videos on my channel, taking notes as you go. It’s crucial you work on the exercises that the videos link to – watching videos alone won’t be enough, practice is essential!

After completing a topic and the relevant exercises from the textbook, I recommend students to look at the Exam Questions by Topic document to see how the content is assessed in an exam context.

You might like to do some mini-tests for yourself as you go in timed conditions, to check that you’ve learned the content well and that you’re able to answer questions confidently!

Start off by making a plan of what you need to study, and when – work backwards from the date that you aim to finish the content by to leave you enough time exam based revision. I usually advise end of March/beginning of April.

Next, categorise the topics/chapters into:

– Those you need to fully relearn

– Those that you don’t need to revisit at all (mostly from AS I would imagine)

– Those that need recapping and some practice/revision, but not learning from scratch

A good way to categorise these is to look through your exam scripts (you can request these from your school!) and see where your areas of strength and weakness are.

Once you have those topics categorised, work backwards from the end date, and set some goals for what you need to achieve, and when by – that should have you on track, and feeling really confident for what you need to do!

The international A-Level is structured differently to the British A-Level, but the content has huge overlaps. If you go to the Resources section of this website, you’ll find the ‘YouTube Playlists with International Mappings’ tool – select your exam board and module, and the videos that you need to use will appear!

I am currently working on populating all of these for all of the modules – so please be patient as I complete them!

This will largely depend on your areas of interest and individual strengths, however, I would say that FS1 and FM1 are a very typical, solid combination – I like that learning them will strengthen your Applied Maths, and in general, both these modules are accessible.

Please note that you can be successful in whichever combination you choose, and there isn’t one that is ‘easiest’ or ‘hardest’. They all have different grade boundaries to reflect the challenge of the individual papers, and they all have their pros and cons – if you want, check out my video ranking them, where I go into much more detail.

I am not offering private tuition at this time, but if I have openings in the future, I will make it publicly known!